[Dominik] [for 0.16] Requesting too much

[keyboardhack]

Requesting more than there is space for in a chest doesn't work correctly.

The expected behavior is for the bots to fill the chest up with the item and then not have any robots hover over the chest with more items. This is also how it works in 0.14.
In 0.15 The chest will be filled up and then additional robots will hover over the chest untill there is more space. Sometimes only one robot hovers over the chest but multiple robot at once can be waiting for space.

Steps to reproduce:

• Place a roboport, passive provider and requester chest
• Fill the passive provider with something
• Request 20k of something in the requester chest
• Wait for bots to move as much as they can an for as many robots to go back to the roboport
• Atleast 1 robot will now hover over the requester chest with 4 more something.

Here is an example of how it can affect a base. All 218 bots are hovering above the requester chests.



Saves attached where the difference in behavior can be observed.

unrelenting_bots_14.zip

0.14 save

(2.21 MiB) Downloaded 53 times

unrelenting_bots_15.zip

0.15 save

(3.53 MiB) Downloaded 82 times

[impetus maximus]

here's an idea, don't request more than the chest can hold.

[Dominik]

Yes, I can see it works like you say. Thanks for the great setups you prepared! There is another problem attached to it which is that the robot won't change her mind even when the requested amount is decreased below the number already present in the chest. Will look into it.

[kovarex]

Yes, I can see it works like you say. Thanks for the great setups you prepared! There is another problem attached to it which is that the robot won't change her mind even when the requested amount is decreased below the number already present in the chest. Will look into it.

her? Since when robots are women?

[Dominik]

So after all this behavior is actually desirable.
The robots could carry the exact amount required, but instead they carry their full capacity, even if there is no space for it in the requester. Reason is that in a typical case material flows through the requester and the space gets freed up before the robot arrives and the robot then uses its full potential. However, when the robot arrives and the chest is full, it will either carry the load to a storage chest if one is present (there isn't any in your setup). Otherwise there is nowhere to go and it will wait at the requester for the space to free up. So as a result, some cases are not ideal, but it leads to higher efficiency of the whole network.

In the meantime i run into a real bug though, which I repaired for 0.16. When there is a full requester with a filter over the capacity, every interaction with the filter slide bar would dispatch another robot.

@kovarex They are, and hot ones!

[keyboardhack]

Placing a storage chest makes sense but doesn't work.
I have attached a save where placing a storage chest(there is one in your hand in the save) makes the robots take and put into the storage chest forever.

wierd_bots.zip

(100.23 MiB) Downloaded 127 times

[Dominik]

You are right and it looks very funny in your save, like fruit flies It is a result of the bug I mentioned and it is already repaired for 0.16.

Edit... For now, the hovering bots should not pose any problem, they just hold resources until another train comes to collect it.